I have been keeping fish since Jan 2001. I am currently downsizing the number of tanks while upsizing the volume. Right now I have 16 tanks of which one is exclusively a bio-farm for keeping cycled filters. The tanks range from 5.5 to 75 gals. and are all fw.

I split my efforts between planted community type tanks and pleco spawning and growout tanks. I mostly work with hypancistrus now. Over the years I have had about 23 different species (including the plecos) spawn successfully in my tanks. A few more gave me eggs that never made it to fry stage,

I joined here because of a thread I stumbled onto in a search and which I tried to make my first post in. It was a fairly long and detailed reply and when I hit preview I was informed I was no longer logged on and lost close to 45 minutes worth of work. I will eventually try to rewrite the post with all the quotes and links. It was this thread Using Prime while cycling your tank

Nitrification in fw aquariums is a pet subject of mine and I spend more time on Google Scholar searching the literature than I do on the normal Google search. I have written a couple of cycling related articles for another large general site.

I am always interested in finding new fish sites. Some I join and then leave and on others I stick around. I am hoping this site is one of the latter

A bit of personal info. I am retired, never married and live about 40 miles NNE of NYC.

Its just been made too difficult to post on this site. I have twice now spent close to an hour composing posts which have been lost to the site. The first because it logged me off and did not show this, so when I hit post it vanished.

The second time yesterday I got some sort of message intimating that I was spamming or doing something wrong and the post was lost.

I am too old for this sort of thing, so I wish you all well and will be on my way.